Brand advertising has a much higher ROAS when done well. The challenge is doing it well, and knowing if you did. My experience has been that SMEs rarely have the appreciation for art necessary to do branding well, and without strong branding, brand campaigns are a waste of money.
And it's not just a lack money. They'd rather spend the money on ads than on people. In some industries, that's a better strategy, but for most they would benefit greatly from recognizing that all customers, both B2B and B2C, are in fact humans.
Founders have an advantage here, because they can operate on a longer time scale.
(Side note, GM spent $3140000000 on ads in 2018.)
The engineering bounties would be for open source hardware, software, and tooling challenges, with a heavy focus on optimizing robots and social computer vision problems.
The races each weekend would alternate between full size trucks in a strong man style competition, manned quadcopters doing search and rescue challenges, and autonomous cars in an urban race series.
I would spend the remaining $10,000,000 from the week's budget on vocational scholarships and micro-loans for low income single parents.
If anyone from GM is reading this, let's talk.
There's no space for brand positioning campaigns, or brand awareness, or anything that it's not tracked into a direct sale/lead.
Like you said, branding takes time, with huge investments - and usually it's almost a leap of faith because of the sheer amount of budget and pressure it requires, namely in terms of GRPs.
That's why testing used to be done in focus groups, and other forms of market research, to support a brand strategy.
Maybe branding is a "luxury" SMEs can't afford, but the thing they don't get is: it's a long term investment.